The Week of the Young Child (C&D, 25, Purple, Square)

The theme for the third week of April was "The Week of the Young Child". Since we finished our Letter of the Week study, we are now reviewing our letters! We started off our review with letters C & D and continued our number study with the number 25! We have gone through our shapes and colors once, so from now until graduation, we will talk about two each week and do some small review activities. We worked this week on squares and purple.

This week we read: Not a Box by Antoinette Portis
                                        My Garden by Kevin Henkes
                                        The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt
                                        Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson
                                        Press Here by Herve Tullet

Our question of the week was "Why do you like to come to school?"

To review the color purple we talked about things in real life, at morning meeting, that are purple. The kids also colored pictures of purple things. I found these pages on pinterest, and I love the concept! My general rule of thumb is that if the children can explain to me their reasoning for coloring an object, then I am all for it!

To review the square shape the children practiced recognizing the shape and colored squares. I created this little picture full of the shape. They needed to color the squares purple and then the rest of the balloons other colors!

For the number of the week:25 we started off by counting to and backward from twenty-five. They love doing this every day and when we get to the end of counting backward, they all scream blast off!! ;) The kids also practiced writing the number and word for twenty-five. 

When I started in my class, I found a page like this from education.com, so I made my own for the number 25. The children have to practice writing the number and then color in that number of squares. It's a great way to introduce graphing and helps them to work on their one-to-one correspondence.                    

For our theme "The Week of the Young Child",  we visited our Art Show!

We sang "If You're Happy and You Know It."

The children used purple ribbon to paint a picture!

We painted with spring cookie cutters.

In their journals, the children wrote about what they might want to be when they grow up.

While reviewing the letter C and D, we are really focusing on practicing writing, having good control over letter formation, and having a solid knowledge of the letter sounds.

My children that are moving on to kindergarten next year, are working on sight words and this worksheet from Confessions of a Homeschooler are amazing! They challenge the children to think of the word in a new way and get creative. This week they worked on the word "do".

I created envelope games for each letter of the alphabet that we played the first way through the alphabet. My children that are staying with me another year played these again to work on their letter sounds.

We reviewed writing and finding the letters that we are talking about, C and D. The pages for my younger group came from Letters for Little Learners, and I found these more advanced worksheets for my older children from education.com.

The book Alphabet and Counting that we used used  to turn our letters into fun animals, also has cute little tongue twisters for each letter. I printed them large and illustrated them, then I laminated them with contact paper. Using wet erase markers, we take turns finding the letters hidden!

On their own, they searched for the letters as well!

The letter of the week books have pages that you can make a book into. I picked from both to get my "favorites". Each week, we'll work on these pages, and each child will end up with an alphabet book at the end of the year. I like to do these pages, because not only do they get more practice writing the letter, but they also have to finish the sentence on the page, which is really cool. It gets them thinking!

There is a 15-20 minute span of time while the children are waking up from our rest time and afternoon snack. During this time, we talk about what they will be doing in the afternoon with their afternoon teacher, and what we did in the morning. We also spend some time learning about animals through videos. This week we watched about the cat, camel one, camel two, chipmunk, cow, chameleon, deer, dog, and dragonfly.

I made an "I have, who has" game filled with C and D things. I love this game because once it starts, the children completely direct it. I love seeing them help each other and play with each other.

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